Remixing transcultural mobilities on screen: Remapping Europe, a Remix Project (2013)

The chapter explores formal and conceptual practices of remix as aesthetic strategies of representing transcultural mobilities on screen, crossing boundaries, and trans-coding meanings. It focuses on the European Cultural Foundation’s participatory initiative Remapping Europe, a Remix Project and the live-cinema performance Eurovisions, which create new narratives on migration via remixing film and media archives. The analysis contextualizes the discussed initiatives within the work of earlier art collectives as the Black Audio Film Collective – BAFC (UK), the Virtual Migrants (UK) and ZEMOS98 (Spain), whose creative approaches re-emerge as relevant artistic devices for deconstructing the reproduction of discursive racism across Europe and the UK. The chapter aims to articulate the emergence of a shared aesthetic language – a transcultural aesthetic praxis – defined by complementary modalities of trans-coding such as: the representation of transcultural identities and third space tropes as discursive strategies for the negotiation of cultural difference; the sampling of cultural repertoires as an expression of symbolic resistance; the emergence of an encoding-decoding-encoding cycle of critical media participation – a re-thought version of Stuart Hall’s model of encoding/decoding (1973/1980), defined by the generation of new meanings at the receiving end; and embodied aesthetic experiences that destabilize discursively produced binary oppositions at an affective level.